Project Excellence /Education - HG McCully Upstate
Seniors Connect

Access the Internet. Email family. Chat, surf, and search on your favorite topics. Travel the world. Explore. Learn. Seniors aren’t often the focus when talk turns to learning and developing new skills. That’s not the case with McCully Upstate Pioneers, however. Since 2006, a good amount of their conversation has centered on seniors, on senior centers, and on ways to bridge the digital divide.

Sensing the unique value today’s technology can offer seniors, particularly those with far-flung families, mobility, independence, and other quality of life issues, Newark Pioneers began exploring the possibilities. They soon discovered that many senior centers in the area were largely lacking in the equipment needed to add that value. The result is Newark’s Seniors Connect project.

Thanks to 70 committed Pioneers, the local officials and other community organizations supporting the effort, including Verizon Foundation, 15 fully equipped computer stations are now in place at senior centers across northern New Jersey. And so far, members have personally trained over 450 seniors in how to use and enjoy them. Their thirst for learning revitalized, those seniors are now introducing others to the digital age.

Project Excellence /Education - HG McCully Upstate
Butterfly Fairies: Mysteries and Magic
As a backdrop for lessons on bio-diversity, food chains, and neighborhood habitats, the lifecycle of the Monarch butterfly is a conservationist’s dream. McCully Upstate members are using it to migrate the minds of youngsters at four northern New Jersey schools to an appreciation of the not-so-obvious world around them. And the kids, well, they are wild for it.

Developed under the banner of Project WILD, a national conservation education program, and inspired by a children’s book, McCully Upstate’s multi-level project brings third and fourth grade students, teachers, and Pioneers together to "parent" a new generation of Monarchs. Having studied the species and its development, each team prepares a schoolyard habitat, complete with milkweed host plants, rearing towers and holding houses. Then, over a period of 30-40 days, students witness and tend to the wonder of life as the tiny eggs they have harvested hatch and grow from caterpillar to pupa, chrysalis, and then, butterfly.

Monarchs range from Canada, through the U.S. and into Mexico, and their annual migration south allows students in all three countries to tag and track their butterflies progress. Which will make it? Will ours return? With this project, the mystery, the magic, continues.

Project Excellence /Life Enrichment - Excelsior
Camp Badger Spruce Up
Excelsior’s outstanding effort to bring Camp Badger back into compliance with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) regulations won the chapter a Project Excellence Award for 2008. In 2009 Excelsior volunteers returned (135 of them) to the special education summer camp in central New York for a weekend of activity designed to keep Camp Badger in fine form for many years to come.

In addition to building two more wheelchair ramps and making the fishing dock accessible, Pioneers gave the Infirmary a new tin roof and the Pavilion a new ceiling. They spread a truckload of fresh stone over pathways and painted and color-coded stairs to aid in navigation . . . planted gardens, trees and shrubs . . . mowed, weed-wacked and "bush-hogged" away a season’s worth of brush and debris and . . . once again, true to Excelsior form, the giving didn’t stop there.

Continuing the project’s educational element, the chapter installed chalkboard/corkboard dividers in classrooms, provided two new computers and printers, and arranged for three years of Internet access. All told, the chapter contributed some $14,000 in materials and 3,500 volunteer hours to the project.

Project Excellence /Life Enrichment - LH Kinnard
Reading Club -- Berks Women in Crisis
Reading Pioneers have long supported the Berks Women in Crisis (BWIC) shelter with food, luggage, cell phones and hygiene kits. Members were eager to do more, particularly in the area of education, but atop everyone’s BWIC wish list was to replace the old wooden playground that had rotted out years ago. To meet their objectives, Pioneers would need $5,000, a potentially daunting sum for a small club thinking big.

The competitive grant process levels the playing field, however, and with help from Verizon Foundation, the dreams at Reading Club became a reality for BWIC. Today, co-branded backpacks for BWIC children are as plentiful as they are useful. Every child receives a dictionary, a book, school supplies, a "Lingo" vocabulary learning game Kinnard is developing, and a Hug-a-Bear. Today, for each mom there are Pioneers tote bags of much-needed supplies as well as a duffle full of sheets and towels. And there is that brand new playground for all of BWIC to enjoy. With the club’s first press coverage in some time, the Reading community is re-awakening to a resource folks at BWIC have known well, for years.

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